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Latest News
Tokyo Marui MP7A1 JUST ARRIVED!!! (2006-02-09)Breaking news! The very first batch of the Marui MP-7 (airsoft MP7) has been arrived the RedWolf warehouse just an hour ago. Package includes the gun, a standard 50 round removable magazine, 7.2V micro battery EX and 110V EX charger. We are accepting orders worldwide. Demand is tremendous so order now to secure yourself one. BUY NOW!
A brand new class of the small arms, the MP-7 Personal Defence Weapon (PDW) is intended to be a defensive sidearm for second-line troops, vehicle crews and other military personnel. The MP-7 was first announced in 2000, entered into production in 2001 and has been adopted by some German special units according to some sources, in addition to being offered for export sales and for NATO-trials as an another could-be NATO PDW (the only other competitor is the compact yet much bigger FN P-90).
The MP-7 is designed as a compact submachine gun, with the magazine being inserted into pistol grip, and folding forward grip with retractable stock. All these features are ideally replicated in the Tokyo Marui's model and make this a perfect backup weapon, or a primary CQB weapon! Being a high performance submachine gun, the MP-7 real steel is exceptionally lightweight (1.7kg), and Marui's replica (1.4kg) comes pretty close. The gun can be fired single-handedly, or with two hands, either like a pistol or as an SMG when using a front grip. Retractable stock can be extended to give additional stability. With stock and front grip collapsed, the MP-7 can be carried like any big pistol and is super compact - perfect as a full-auto backup weapon (can be holstered like a sidearm!) For skirmishes, the MP7 is great for shooting around corners and spraying your opponents to the moon!
Accessories also available immediately:
- Tokyo Marui 50rd Magazine for MP7A1 (TM-MAG-MP7A1) - Already in stock!!
- Tokyo Marui 7.2V Micro Battery EX (TM-BAT-72EX) - Already in stock!!
- Tokyo Marui EX Battery Charger (TM-ACC-EXCHR) - Pre order
- Tokyo Marui New Pro Sight - (TM-ACC-NPSIGHT) - Already in stock!!
- Tokyo Marui Pro-Silencer Short Type (14mm CCW) - (TM-ACC-PROSIL-SHORT) - Already in stock!


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Inexperienced drivers probably shouldn't drive fast, but even experienced drivers can find themselves in scary situations from time to time.
Take this Ferrari 360 pilot, for example. He lost control of the car in a turn at Circuit Park Zandvoort in the Netherlands after putting a wheel off the other day, but by some miracle, narrowly avoided crashing it.
Watch him drape his hands over the wheel and sigh. It almost makes you feel like you're the one who just spun out in a Ferrari on a busy track. Phew!
(Thanks everyone for the tip!)

subset: commoncrawl


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Sox bullpen blows it again.
Don Cooper needs no more prompting than the word "bullpen" to get going. The White Sox pitching coach has heard all the things that have been said and read many of the things that have been written about a relief corps that has struggled mightily for the past 40 or so games. Thus he knows the questions even before they come. "It usually does straighten itself out, but it's taking a lot longer to straighten itself out," Cooper said of his bullpen. It certainly didn't straighten things out Tuesday. Though they had to work overtime because starter John Danks lasted just four-plus innings, Sox relievers struggled again against the Florida Marlins. Ryan Bukvich gave up a game-tying homer to Josh Willingham in the seventh inning, and Matt Thornton gave up a go-ahead homer to Dan Uggla in the ninth as the Marlins knocked off the Sox 7-5 in front of a sellout crowd of 35,327 at U.S. Cellular Field. The Sox bullpen now has a 2-10 record and 8.14 ERA over its last 37 games. "This is a joke. Believe me," Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said. Perhaps the most surprising struggler has been Thornton, who worked a perfect eighth before allowing Uggla's homer. He then gave up back-to-back singles to Hanley Ramirez and Miguel Cabrera before being pulled with no outs in the ninth. "Thornton has been fair. He's had good moments. He's had bad moments," Cooper said of the left-hander reliever, who is 2-3 with a 6.53 ERA one year after going 5-3 with a 3.33 ERA. "So I'd give him a fair grade because he's undertaking a new, bigger, more higher responsibility role in the late innings. He hasn't figured it out yet, but we're still fighting for that." Of course, things might have played out differently had Danks lasted more than four innings. The Marlins put Danks and the Sox in an early hole when Florida's first three batters all produced extra-base hits — including a two-run homer by Ramirez — and scored. Danks gave up another run in the fourth and lasted just 89 pitches. He has failed to pitch more than 5 2/3 innings in any of his past five starts. "With the pitch count I have, I should be able to easily go seven innings — I don't know about seven innings — but it is enough to go possible seven or more innings," Danks said. "I think (Mark) Buehrle and (Jon) Garland and guys have proven that. I just want to mimic what they're doing and get going." The Sox don't want to pull the rookie fifth starter so quickly, but it really can't be avoided when he nears the 100-pitch count so early in the game. "The only limits are the one he puts out there for us," Cooper said. "The limits are if he runs up a high pitch count short in the game. We're looking for 100 pitches, somewhere in about seven innings. Not in the fifth. So efficiency becomes important." Because Danks was pulled after allowing Ramirez's leadoff double in the fifth, the Sox bullpen had to take over early. Florida could have made the same excuse since its starter, Dontrelle Willis, left after just one inning because of soreness in his left forearm. While Willis was in the game, the Sox got to him on Jermaine Dye's RBI single and Josh Fields' three-run homer in the first. The South Siders increased their lead to 5-3 with an unearned run in the second, but that's all the scoring they managed as Florida handed them their 18th loss in their past 23 games. "If they think they're going to win like that, good luck," Guillen said of a Sox offense that had just three hits after the first inning. "It's a joke. "The talent is there, believe me. We're wasting our talent. I'm tired of being positive." More White Sox coverage can be found online at www.dailysouthtown.com/sports.


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I have always thought about opening a small business at home as my retiring plan (I am in my 30's). By retiring, I would mean to not join any companies anymore and would like to run the business on my own.
But whatever sort of businesses I thought up are either failed from or already fully filled the market. Otherwise, I always fear that I may go to jail after a while running a business from government loans without being able to pay my debt because there are no customers in years long.
Seriously,is it because I am truly lazy or because of something else as my personality or characters that I sometimes think I "don't want to go to work for someone else anymore". How does working at home earn me money ?
My current salary in a company X is around, for example, $100; if I can make $60-90 with home work, then I may rethink to quit the X, 10 to 40 bucks are X's constraint fee.
Please help me think up a plan.


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Closing arguments will be presented next week in the trial of a Fayetteville man accused of raping and killing a 5-year-old girl more than three years ago.
Mario McNeill is charged with rape and murder in the death of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis in November 2009. After prosecutors finished presenting evidence Thursday morning, McNeill said he wouldn't testify.
His attorneys rested without presenting any evidence.
Closing arguments will be held Tuesday morning in a Cumberland County courtroom. The 32-year-old McNeill could face the death penalty if convicted.
Shaniya's body was found Nov. 16, 2009, six days after her mother reported her missing.
Investigators have said Shaniya's mother, Antoinette Davis, gave her daughter to McNeill to pay off a drug debt. Prosecutors say they'll try Davis after McNeill's trial ends.


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Hand Fans
Pretty, fun, practical, and functional, our hand fans are available in a broad spectrum of signature colors and variety of styles. Quintessential for rustic chic decorating, you can hang them, gift them, fan yourself with them - you can even include them in a wedding centerpiece or bouquet! We love to feature them as party favors for guests to take home, but also recommend a personal collection to stay cool on summer days (the perfect purse accessory according to Vogue Magazine!).


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A patent granted to Apple in late-August allows governments to disable iPhones and other smartphones, targeting specific apps even, when they enter what is deemed a "sensitive" area.
U.S. Patent No. 8,254,902, titled "Apparatus and methods for enforcement of policies upon a wireless device," enables phone policies to be set to change "one or more functional or operational aspects of a wireless device ... upon the occurrence of a certain event."
Camera? Off. Voice recorder? Off. No calls out, no calls in. Total blackout; or, for an event like a concert, the organizers could target specifically just recording functions of a user's phone.
Zach Whittaker of ZDnet points out that "although Apple may implement the technology ... it would be down to governments, businesses and network owners to set such policies."
The policies would be activated primarily by GPS and would create a perimeter around a sensitive area–like a building, protest or riot— to prevent users from taking pictures or recording, video, prevent "wireless devices from communicating with other wireless devices" and force devices into "sleep mode," according to the patent.
The patent notes that "Covert police or government operations may require complete "blackout" conditions" — which essentially gives police a "kill switch" they can flip prior to conducting an operations.
This may seem cool for military purposes abroad, against America's enemies, but domestic applications have other implications — like stifling a successful protest.
Here's Tim Pool—who has live-streamed the recent protests in Spain as well as those of Occupy Wall Street—explaining the implications of the patent.
SEE ALSO: These Are The Scariest Electronic Weapons In The U.S. Arsenal >
Please follow Military & Defense on Twitter and Facebook.
When Alex Arbuckle covered the Occupy Wall Street protests, he decided to show a straightforward view of the police. Instead, he found himself arrested. A few days ago, he was vindicated.


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Get your jet fuel and oxidant ready Waltrip, NASCAR is introducing the "Car Of Tomorrow" after five years of testing (it takes a lot of engineering to drive in a circle). Designed to improve safety, performance, competition and cost efficiency for teams, the Car of Tomorrow fits all four current templates (Ford, Toyota, GM and Dodge). The car will make its debut at the Bristol Motor Speedway and will be used at sixteen events on tracks less than a mile and a half in length. One of the features we look forward to most is the deatchable wing!
Car of Tomorrow could fuel future expansion [TSN-CA]
All of our NASCAR coverage [internal]


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Slippery Slopes and Sticking Surfaces: Explore the Forces of Friction
|Areas of Science
Mechanical Engineering
|Time Required
|Short (2-5 days)
|Material Availability
|Readily available
|Very Low (under $20)
|Minor injury possible
AbstractWhoopee! No matter what age, who doesn't like flying down the slides at parks and pools? In this experiment, you might be surprised what you can learn about the fascinating forces of friction while sliding down (or sticking to) those fun, slippery slopes. Caution: only speed demons need apply for this activity . . .
ObjectiveThe goal of this project is to use a slide to learn about the forces of friction.
Share your story with Science Buddies!Yes, I Did This Project! Please log in (or create a free account) to let us know how things went.
SourcesThe idea for this project came from this DragonflyTV podcast:
- TPT, 2006. Luge by Jenn and Emily, DragonflyTV, Twin Cities Public Television. Retrieved on January 15, 2018.
Cite This PageGeneral citation information is provided here. Be sure to check the formatting, including capitalization, for the method you are using and update your citation, as needed.
MLA Style
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Last edit date: 2020-07-08
Frictional forces surround us. We rub our hands together to generate heat when we're shivering. Screeching tires burn rubber on the road when cars start too quickly or turn too sharply. Meanwhile, special treads on those same tires cling to the road to keep us safe when we travel icy highways. And who hasn't been grateful at least a few times for the traction exerted from rubber-soled running shoes or water sandals in slippery situations?
We all recognize what friction is, but do you really understand what causes it? This project focuses on friction, its causes and forces and specifically how it affects how fast you can slip down slides. To get you started, check out the project video. It shows how two talented athletes, Emily and Jenn, explored ways to increase speed down a slide. They applied their results to similar tests in their favorite winter sport, the luge. Few of us have Olympic-quality luge runs readily available in our neighborhoods, or can handle the 65 mph speed down a narrow icy chute, so we provide directions on how you can use a standard neighborhood slide to run your experiments on friction.
In the video, Emily and Jenn focused on different techniques to get a quicker push from the top of their luge runs. Ultimately, it's the frictional interactions all along the run that really influence travel speed down to the bottom. Understanding the physics and molecular forces that determine why things slip or grip as they move across surfaces is the goal of this science project.
We most commonly think of friction in terms of surface roughness, like the resistance of two pieces of sand paper catching between our fingers. But there are also small electromagnetic interactions of atoms and molecules sitting on the surface of even smooth objects that are important in generating friction. These tiny but strong molecular snags are especially apparent between very smooth surfaces like two pieces of plate glass that stubbornly stick to each other if not separated by paper or sheets of plastic. In general, when two objects interact they produce some level of frictional force upon each other determined by their weights and the combination of surface roughness and intermolecular sticking. How much friction the two surfaces produce determines whether the objects move or simply remain in place.
A couple of basic laws of physics describe the forces of friction. You'll learn more about these principles as you complete your background research and run your experiments. But in simple terms, when an object is stuck on a surface, like a heavy box you are trying to push along the floor, scientists describe this as a "static" friction interaction because there is no movement. The weight of the box essentially holds it against the floor and the friction generated between the box and floor's surface is greater than the pushing force trying to move it (you). When your buddy comes along to help you out, the pushing force now becomes greater than the static frictional force and the box slides easily along. However, there still is some resistance from the box because it remains in contact with the floor surface; this moving type of friction is called "kinetic" friction. In general, static friction is greater than kinetic friction and that explains why it sometimes takes a shove to get a heavy box moving, but once it's unstuck, it's easier to keep it sliding along the floor.
In this project, a local playground slide serves as your test site for experimenting with static and kinetic friction. You and a friend will explore how to change the frictional forces that can slow you down or speed you up when you push off and slide down. You'll time your runs and experiment with different materials (e.g., pillowcase, towel, cardboard, carpet, plastic bag) to find out how each "speed mat" interacts with the slide to affect your starts and total times. While we've offered suggestions for the types of materials to try in your experiments, no doubt you'll be able to come up with a few ideas of your own. You'll have to take careful measurements with a stopwatch in these experiments because there might only be a fraction of a second difference between some runs and others. But as Jenn said in the video, "that can make all the difference between winning and losing a race." So small differences add up to big results when you are talking about friction.
Good luck, have fun, and watch out below!
Terms and ConceptsTo do this project, you should do research that enables you to understand the following terms and concepts:
- Friction
- Static friction
- Kinetic friction
- Newton's third law of motion
- Rolling and sliding friction
- Coefficient of friction
- Normal force (N)
- Vector diagrams of friction force and net force
- How is friction defined scientifically?
- What are the differences between static and kinetic friction?
- What are the causes of friction?
- What is Newton's Third Law of Motion and how does it relate to friction?
- What factors related to friction come into play when you sit on top of and move down a slide?
- Introductory site with simple definitions of terms related to friction:
Kurtus, R., (2006). Resistive Force of Friction. School for Champions. Retrieved April 28, 2007.
- Basic introduction to a few concepts and mathematical relationships between friction, coefficients of friction, and normal force:
Nave, C.R., (2005). Friction. HyperPhysics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Georgia State University. Retrieved April 28, 2007.
- Good website for high school level lessons on physics and how to use vector diagrams to represent the forces acting on an object:
Henderson, T., (2004), Force and Its Representation. The Physics Classroom. Retrieved April 28, 2007.
- This project is based on:
TPT, (2014, March 5). Luge by Jenn and Emily. DragonflyTV, Twin Cities Public Television. Retrieved Janujary 15, 2018.
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Materials and EquipmentTo do this experiment you will need the following materials and equipment:
- Neighborhood slide, preferably straight or not too curved (longer is better),
- Stop watch that shows time to 1/10 of a second,
- Notepad,
- Pen/pencil,
- A helper to time your runs,
- At least three of the following "speed mats" or test materials to slide on (slides can be made of many different materials—plastic, metal, or concrete, for example—choose speed mats appropriate to your particular slide):
- Pillowcase (cotton, silk, or flannel)
- Bath towel (maybe one washed in fabric softener and one not)
- Small carpet or scatter rug
- Large, plastic garbage bag
- Flattened piece of cardboard or heavy butcher paper
- Other material you'd like to test
Experimental ProcedureCollecting Your Data
- Find a slide to use for your study—the longer the better. Decide which materials you want to use for speed mats in your experiment. Select at least three you think will give you different results.
- You should make two different observations for each mat you use in your tests:
- The Push Off (Static Friction): Note how much effort it takes to get going down the slide. Try to keep your push offs as consistent as possible (where you place your hands, how many times you push, the position of your legs, etc). This will be a "qualitative" measurement. That means you won't assign a number to it, but instead give a description about each push like an "easy" push was all that was needed to get you moving, or "medium", "hard", or "extra effort" was required.
- The Speed (Kinetic Friction): Note the time it takes to get from the top to the bottom of the slide. It's likely that the differences between your tests will be in fractions of a second, so your friend will have to be very good about making careful measurements with the stopwatch. They should start the clock right when you push off, and they should stop the watch the moment they see and hear your feet hit the ground.
- Tips: You might try a few trial runs with no mat to practice taking times before you get into your real tests. Also, be sure to not rush too much as you go down the slide so you don't risk falling off or hurting yourself.
- Do at least ten runs for each type of mat (more trials would be even better). Record a description of the start and the total time for each run in your notebook.
- Calculate the average time for each mat material you used in your tests.
- Make a table that shows the average time for each material as well as your description of each start.
- Do you see any differences in the times or ease of start for your materials? Were some materials faster or slower by a small or large margin?
- Were your results what you expected or were you surprised? If so, how?
- For more advanced analysis, make vector diagrams showing the direction and relative magnitude of the friction forces that illustrate the results for each of your test materials.
- For help with data analysis and setting up tables, see Data Analysis & Graphs.
- For a guide on how to summarize your results and write conclusions based on your data, see Conclusions.
If you like this project, you might enjoy exploring these related careers:
Materials Scientist and EngineerWhat makes it possible to create high-technology objects like computers and sports gear? It's the materials inside those products. Materials scientists and engineers develop materials, like metals, ceramics, polymers, and composites, that other engineers need for their designs. Materials scientists and engineers think atomically (meaning they understand things at the nanoscale level), but they design microscopically (at the level of a microscope), and their materials are used macroscopically (at the level the eye can see). From heat shields in space, prosthetic limbs, semiconductors, and sunscreens to snowboards, race cars, hard drives, and baking dishes, materials scientists and engineers make the materials that make life better. Read more
Mechanical EngineerMechanical engineers are part of your everyday life, designing the spoon you used to eat your breakfast, your breakfast's packaging, the flip-top cap on your toothpaste tube, the zipper on your jacket, the car, bike, or bus you took to school, the chair you sat in, the door handle you grasped and the hinges it opened on, and the ballpoint pen you used to take your test. Virtually every object that you see around you has passed through the hands of a mechanical engineer. Consequently, their skills are in demand to design millions of different products in almost every type of industry. Read more
Mechanical Engineering TechnicianYou use mechanical devices every day—to zip and snap your clothing, open doors, refrigerate and cook your food, get clean water, heat your home, play music, surf the Internet, travel around, and even to brush your teeth. Virtually every object that you see around has been mechanically engineered or designed at some point, requiring the skills of mechanical engineering technicians to create drawings of the product, or to build and test models of the product to find the best design. Read more
- Pick one of the fastest materials from your initial experiment to try these variations.
- Size of contact surface area: sitting vs. lying down; legs straight ahead or tucked onto the mats; taller person vs. shorter person of similar weight.
- Weight of slider: compare two people of very different weights.
- Temperature: try your experiment on a hot day and then repeat it on a cold day.
- Moisture: dry, sunny day versus a foggy day or just after a rain.
- If you use a concrete slide, try it with and without loose sand on the surface of the slide.
- If you have multiple slides, made from different materials (e.g., plastic, metal, concrete), you can extend your experiment to include the different slides.
- For a more quantitative experiment on friction, see the Science Buddies project Effect of Friction on Objects in Motion.
Share your story with Science Buddies!Yes, I Did This Project! Please log in (or create a free account) to let us know how things went.
Ask an ExpertThe Ask an Expert Forum is intended to be a place where students can go to find answers to science questions that they have been unable to find using other resources. If you have specific questions about your science fair project or science fair, our team of volunteer scientists can help. Our Experts won't do the work for you, but they will make suggestions, offer guidance, and help you troubleshoot.
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Papa John's New Zesty Jalapeño and Meats Pizza
Reviews of pizza at chain restaurants.
Papa John's recently introduced a new specialty pizza, the Zesty Jalapeno and Meats Pizza (pepperoni, spicy Italian sausage, jalapeño peppers, and a blend of three cheeses—Mozzarella, Parmesan, and Romano). It caught our attention because it looked oddly familiar (but more on that—and some possible intrigue—after the jump).
Anyway, the Zesty Jalapeño and Meats Pizza is pretty good, as far as chain pizza goes. We ordered it on PJ's thin crust, which, as J. Kenji Lopez-Alt points out, is often the best way to order any of the chain pizzas — "In general, the thin crust don't have that fake butter flavor built into them." (Though Maggie Hoffman said, "I found the crust papery.")
The flavor combination is good. The jalapeños add just enough spiciness without being too overwhelming, and the meat brought saltiness, texture, and a little porkiness to the table.
Nobody in the office really complained that much about this pizza, and in fact I think I kinda ate 2.75 of the eight slices myself.
The intrigue, such that it is? Oh, yeah. It's pretty similar to the Workin' Fire pizza I tried as judge in PJ's Specialty Pizza Challenge in summer. Actually, it's pretty much the same damn pizza! Why is that even a thing? Because the Chicken Cordon Bleu pizza officially won the contest (which meant up to a $10,000 cut of the sales and free pizza for life). It would be nice to see Workin' Fire creator Kendra Chapman, get some recognition here, too!
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


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International Affairs (IA) is offered only as a dual major; therefore, it must be combined with another major.
International Affairs offers students an opportunity to understand the factors and forces that shape the contemporary scene. The program covers all facets of international relations. Students focus on issues facing the international community, the interdependence of political, social, economic, and environmental factors, and the interactions of states and other actors attempting to achieve their foreign policies or goals.
The program enables students to gain specialization in the multidisciplinary field of international relations while also developing a strong foundation in a second major field. In recent years, students have combined their IA major with majors in Anthropology, Computer Science, Chinese Studies, Economics, Environmental Studies, French, German, History, Japanese Studies, Management, Math, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, and Spanish. IA majors can also develop a specific regional track, focusing on Latin America, Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Students who graduate with an IA major are well prepared to pursue careers in the international arena, whether they choose to enter the professional world following graduation or go on to graduate school.
Applying to International Affairs
IA is a selective program and students must apply for admission. IA is offered only as a dual major, which means that all students must also choose a second major field before applying. Application must be made to the Chair of the IA program and will be reviewed by the Chair and the IA advisers.
Application Form (PDF)
Minimum Requirements for Acceptance to the IA Major
To be considered for acceptance into the IA program, students must have a minimum overall GPA of 3.00 and a minimum GPA of 3.00 in their other major. Students must maintain the minimum College and department GPA and at least a 3.00 average in the IA courses to remain in the program. Meeting the minimum requirements does not guarantee acceptance to the program; the Chair and advisors have the final say on whether a student will be admitted to IA.
When To Apply
Students are encouraged to apply for IA between the second semester of their first year and the middle of the second semester of their sophomore year. First-year students who are accepted into the program will be assigned a provisional standing until the completion of the spring semester of the first year. At that time the Chair and advisors will review the student's performance and decide whether or not to grant permanent standing.


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QDevBlog has launched featuring the thoughts of all your favourite Trolltech engineers. Currently "the ramblings of engineers" has a lead entry from KDE founder and Qt lead developer Matthias Ettrich on some basic thoughts about KDE 4. QDevBlog is also on the increasingly large Planet KDE.
Yes, indeed, the technology should not be dropped just because somebody does not like the look&feel.
(I would probably have been better if I would have written something like this, instead of fearing that KIO slaves would become useless.)
Have a nice day!
+1 from me.
Ughh. Right.
"Especially your latest blog entry gives me the impression of a populist (as in 'popular to those who have no idea about what you talk') superficial rant by someone who seems to have lost touch with the pace of KDE community's development."
He's made it abundantly clear in the past why he doesn't like the way Konqueror does things, the way KControl is organised and he's made it abundantly clear why users in a live environment have found these things difficult and he's explained it. If KDE to move into business, organisations and increase it's userbase these are things that need to be addressed. Which part of that was not clear?
I'm afraid you've lost touch with the KDE community, because the KDE community isn't going to attract organisations to using it and isn't going to attract new users and developers otherwise.
Matthias works in a *real* work environment - listen.
"You start trying please. You just can't consider it feasible to dumb down one of the most complex technical tool available to people today to be as easy to use as a phone."
No one's saying it is, but it's quite clear that we can do alot better than Konqueror and some of the things in KDE.
"Make me a slave of my computer's unchangeable behavior"
What makes you think that you would be a slave and things would be unchangeable? You got one word right in that sentence - me. That's what *you* think.
"It does not matter that even non-coding people could easily turn KDE into highly customized installations, perfectly adapted to the particularly needed workflow thanks to XMLGUI and Kiosk."
Since you replied to me in one comment about usability studies, have you done one or at least observed users in a live work environment?
"Then you go on with the file manager topic. As apparently everyone does"
There's a reason that *everyone* does, as he's explained.
"And you know what? Konqueror exactly empowers you to do exactly that, with profiles and the ability to link independent XMLGUI files to those profile."
Your arguments really are shown to be crap right there. There's a massive, massive, huge difference between empowering people to do something and actually doing it. Profiles simply do not cut it, because there is too much functionality that is different between file managing, web browsing etc. Empowering people in an application like a file manager or a web browser is a total cop-out, because you know it's wishy-washy crap. Either it's a file manager or it's not or it's a web browser or it's not. That doesn't mean that you don't have common components between each (what Konqueror is really good at), but you focus on one main thing and do it well. That is a central Unix/open source philosophy.
"Nobody hinders anyone to create highly dedicated profiles limiting Konqueror"
But those profiles have to be created, and even then there is functionality that is simply not common between different use cases. Do you need cookie and security settings in a file manager or vice versa? No, of course you bloody dont.
"Nobody hinders anyone to create highly dedicated profiles limiting Konqueror to just what is needed in a dedicated web browser, just what is needed in a dedicated file manager, just what is needed in a dedicated FTP client, just what is needed in a dedicated Commader clone, just like what is needed in whatever use case one can come up."
But all that is simply not being come up with because you simply cannot separate and add what you need from and to Konqueror. It's too much of an overarching application.
"say the issue is with the code while the actual issue is that everyone even including of the project itself (by the way of defaults) fail to make good use of the configuration possibilities."
Funny, funny, funny. It's all the users' fault! They're not using KDE properly! Please do get your head out of your arse. If people are failing to make good use of the configuration possibilities continuously, then that should at least tell you something is wrong. And just how much *configuring* should an average person do exactly?
If you have to configure something too much then it simply isn't usable.
"Regarding those I consider the call for "hot coding sessions" to be misled and just resulting in unnecessarily redundant coding which could be better used within KDE where the actual shortcommings are."
Errr, those are shortcomings.
"I call for better documentation, for better user, sysadmin and distro creator documentation as well as better dox within KDE code."
Document what exactly? From what you've written you don't document anything other than "Configure it to do what you want.", "You can configure x from here, and also from here as well, oh and also from here.", "You need to go through several levels of dross to configure this, but if you don't want the dross you can configure it" or "You can edit this file here...."
"I call for better documentation, for better user, sysadmin and distro creator documentation as well as better dox within KDE code."
Yer. Absolutely wonderful documentation that would make for a sys admin. You do realise that a sys admin needs pretty clear documentation, don't you? And you don't cop-out with the 'distro creator' stuff because KDE cannot lump things on to the shoulders of distributors. That tac has clearly failed because you end up getting something that isn't integrated, doesn't work well together and ends up not being KDE at all. What Matthias has described is KDE's fault in its own back yard, and no one can solve it apart from KDE.
>If Konqueror gains focus then KDE as a whole gains features, simply because more users will use the dedicated applications.
Totally agree. I think there should be more focus on perfecting the bread&butter functions of Konqueror File Manager (ie. managing files ;). For example, you can't cut, copy, paste, trash and delete in the tree view using the keyboard and you can't rename folders using the mouse:
You also can't paste anything into the Home Folder by right-clicking on its icon because apparently the Home Folder is not a folder, but a link.
Here's a solution:
Konqueror should be modified to show the Root Folder sidebar by default. When the user first opens Konqueror, their home folder should be selected and expanded. The only folders visible should be /, /home, and /home/username. Everything else should be hidden and expandable if the user clicks on the Show system folders tick. Conversely, there should also be a Hide system folders tick when the system folders are expanded. The appearance of the ticks should be configurable by right clicking and from Konqueror's main configuration.
All the actions that can be performed on a folder in the right-side panel should also be performable on a folder in the sidebar tree-view.
> Heck, if you really love it the way it is, why don't you join its
> development team?
Because I have enough projects to take care of? I can't join teams of every software pieace I use and like ;).
> I have yet to see a single KDE developer who uses Konqueror and not Konsole
> for simple file management tasks like copying files.
I do. Although I have to have normal mouse for that - touchpads etc. don't count. If I have to work with laptop without external mouse, I prefer keyboard as much as possible and therefore use Konsole mostly.
I have yet to find a graphical file manager that works as well as the console. Although there are some things in Konq that I find compelling and useful.
I dare someone to match the simplicity of this command in any graphical environment:
rm *~
ls *.bin, or *.jpg, or *.pl
or even
tar -zxf (first couple of letters) [tab][enter]
These are a few of the things I do regularly and quickly.
On the other hand being able to click on a *tar.gz file to browse it's contents is seriously slick, or previews of images, text files, etc. The most frustrating thing is the time it takes to get to the file I want.
There is a vast potential for improving KDE. Getting rid of a few toolbars or tidying up some dialogs ain't gonna cut it though. These are difficult problems, and the audience is tough.
I will bite... :)
> rm *~
In Konqueror:
Type *~ in location bar
Select all temp files and delete OR
Filter your view using the dirfilter plugin
Select all temp files and delete
Granted it does not beat rm *~ which is a single command, but I want to see someone come up with an easier way to do this in any graphical environment!!!
> ls *.bin, or *.jpg, or *.pl
Same thing here!! Type *.bin in the said directory under Konqueror or use the directory filter plugin. I definitely need to write some blurb about how to use the directory filter plugin as people seem not to use this useful plugin at all. Of course that is a shameless plugin on my part...
> tar -zxf (first couple of letters) [tab][enter]
Split the current view in Konqueror.
Browse into the archive and
Drag and drop the folder into the other view...
I know some of these require multiple steps in GUI, but it is just as simple to do in the GUI as they are on the command line. Now if you had given an example of piping results of one command to another, then... Just today I had to do
find . -name "*.ui" | grep -v -e Base
which is not easy to do in GUI, but then again every tool has its own purpose...
interesting Idea though,
that way onsole is embedded in the address bar, and you can do everything in konqueror. those commands can also be configured to open the output in another tab of konqueror instead of present tab for tar etc.
or when one does tar zxvf files.tar.gz * another pane of konqueror shows caption as 'adding files to files.tar.gz'
if we keep the commands common to konsole and konqueror then what ever can be done in konsole can be done in konqueror too.
this should be th type of konqueror in kde 4 :)
For those that believe Gnome philosophy is helping them... take a look at their desktop percentage as a whole. Their share of the Linux/BSD desktop market is actually SHRINKING. XFCE is taking market share from them because its easy to out-simplify the simply desktop
have you any stats to back that statment up?
Yes, power users want the features and newbies want something as simple as Firefox. This should be easy to do with multiple configurations of Konqueror.
Note that to do this, a design error needs to be fixed. The View Profiles: "filemanagement" & "webbrowsing" are part of the code -- you can NOT change the default Profile for "File" or "Web" even by hand editing a configuration file. This is a bug and it needs to be fixed.
If I understood this correct, the main point has to do not with the 'gnome approach', but with the technical maintainability of all the miriads of possible setups. It's impossible to test them all.
Of course, perfect software is flexible as a matter of nature, so it doesn't need testing anyway. But nobody has written perfect software yet.
No, it has to do with usability.
you're both right.
I think David is pointing to Havoc Pennington's eerily similar comments located under the "The Question of Preferences" section of this article: http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html
So, I suppose there are a few questions:
1) Are Pennington and Ettrich saying the same thing?
2a) if so, do people agree with the software philosophy espoused by Pennington and Ettrich?
2b) if not, how do they differ?
2) if the Answer to number 1) and 2a) are "yes", what about the implementation of the philosophy by GNOME do people find undesirable, and how can KDE do it better?
I don't remember Pennington ever dissing KMail's non-focus MDI as bad usability so they sure are not the same.
Hmmm... it seems that Pennington, a GTK+/GNOME developer, (mostly) used GNOME examples of (allegedly) bad usability to make his point. Here it seems that Ettrich, a Qt/KDE developer, is using mostly KDE examples of (allegedly) bad usability to make his point.
So, each developer targeted his own desktop to make his point. That seems similar to me. :-)
Criticism of a project by one of its own members should be respected if the criticisms are meant to be constructive and lead to improvements. I understand Ettrich's blog comments to be constructive and to attempt to make KDE better for 4.0.
Whether or not you agree with his criticisms is a completely different matter, of course. That is where the debate over the content of the criticisms is important.
Just my thoughts on the matter.
I consider his criticisms as uninformed sounding thus misleading, too vague and counter-productive rather than constructive, but I guess that's abundantly clear from my lenghty post further above.
"I consider his criticisms as uninformed sounding thus misleading, too vague and counter-productive rather than constructive"
Vague? Oh yer, that wasn't vague at all.
Decent down-to-Earth guy that Matthias Ettrich. He's said some things that needed saying there, and it's nice that he's 'actually seen' users using KDE in an environment to get work. Trust me, once you've done that things take on a different perspective.
Sure, I have seen the videos [http://primates.ximian.com/~pete/GUADEC/wms-guadec-2005.sxi], however the solution to that problem is a data-driven development process were design decisions can be taken based on feedback from actual usability testing. There are people doing that [http://www.openusability.org] and they actually help KDE to become better. That's hard work. Blog entries like this are entertaining but do little to fix any problem. KDE has had a mailinglist list for a long time were usability was supposed to be discussed and that was filled with armchair usability experts just like Matthias, it has done very little to make KDE better.
I totally sympathise Waldo, but it just seems to be very difficult to convince some developers of the need to see users out in a live environment or to convince them to listen a bit to users who have. They may seem like armchair usability people, and some are, but a lot aren't. You might say that the people who write the code decide, and you'd be right. But to write code to make usability better in KDE you need to have existing developers on your side, and a lot just don't seem to be.
Konqueror is a classic example. Many developers seem to be very, very confused about the difference between a kitchen-sink, swiss army knife Konqueror and the code re-use that Konqueror has between itself and different applications. That's what's needed - reuse of different components, not an all-in-one everything application.
It's nothing very difficult. They are things he's described there that you can solve within about a week, including talking time, if everyone pulls in the right direction.
You are dodging Waldo's point that it's usability studies what matter. Listening to a couple of users is not the same.
What are usability studies except listening to (and observing) users?
Have you ever watched an inexperienced user working with something moderately complex like a spreadsheet?
The user would be totally lost. Many never again touch spreadsheets. But the spreadsheet was the application that established desktop computers in business.
Just to illustrate that usability is very complex. Specialized applications require special knowledge to make usable. User experience helps, but what user doing what?
Doing so on a grander scale. It is important to be aware that there are different kind of users, different kind of use cases for computers, and different user behavior and expectations in different regions and countries. KDE has always been listening to a couple kinds of users which are techno savy and/or motivated enough to report their issues directly to developers, to mailinglists or to bugzilla. Those users however doesn't give you the whole picture, nor does listening to users in your particular environment do so. This is the differentiation I do between (good) usability studies and (armchair usability observatios through) watching a small amount of users. Please note the talk about the study Waldo linked in his post, it takes most of this all into consideration.
It's suicide to listen to those mythical dumb users who aren't motivated enough to even know what KDE is or how to provide feedback, when you have REAL users and a REAL community right here and right now giving you feedback.
Alienating REAL users in the hopes of capturing a larger market share from the sheeples is just plain foolish for a project like KDE.
Well said.
I think datschge meant to underline _a_couple_, not _users_
"You are dodging Waldo's point that it's usability studies what matter."
Err, that's what I said. You're totally dodging the issues in that post.
"Listening to a couple of users is not the same."
Did you read what I wrote? I didn't say listen, I said watch, and preferably listen as well. I doubt very much whether you've even listened to a couple of users with all the crap you've posted, and that's the point.
I think you're secretly hoping to ask for massive usability studies that will be difficult to undertake for most so they'll get bogged down, and then it can all go away. It won't. You can't just pluck usability studies out of the air.
Certainly, usability studies is the way to go, but there are a lot of things that can just be just implemented because it is common sense from a usability perspective. The first elementary step is just to remove, remove and remove. I think much of this falls in under that category.
The usability discussions in KDE goes nowhere, but the problem with them not primarily that there are "armchair" usability experts. That would have corrected itself if the discussions had any consequences for development. I think that you fail to realize that the real problem is of a political nature - it is the fact that the decisions are made by engineers with a different agenda than ordinary users. For just this reason comments like this probably what is needed the most - an opinion from someone that really has the power to influence. In a discussion that calls for change, it is common that the defender of status quo attempts to dissmiss the discussion, rather that face up to the problem posed. That is what you have chosen to do now, even if it rather implausibly means questioning Matthias' professional crediblity in usability issues.
You stole my idea! http://dot.kde.org/1120343862/1120354997/1120381902/1120465909/
As you can see, I whole-heartedly agree. The compromises made to Konqueror in trying to be a generic file-viewer (an acceptable extension of the web-browser idea in my opinion) and a file-manager have made it more awkward to use.
I also like the way you referred to Microsoft, I think they really hit on something with their "task-driven" interface (yes, even evil Micro$oft gets it right once in a while). I remember going over some stuff with my Dad. I asked him did he know how to copy a file (expecting him to reply Edit->Copy) and he pointed to the obvious "Copy File" item in the "File and Folder Actions" section of the side-pane.
KDE really has all the infrastructure to make this work. You could have an side-pane, with
[File/Folder] Actions
Open with program (pops up a dialog with all appropriate programs)
[finsh off with Actions taken from the actions submenu in the context menu]
Common Places
*My Home
*My Group (home://)
*My Devices (system:// or drives://)
*Audio CD Files (audiocd://) (be intelligent, and don't show if no audio CD?)
[The meta data from the tooltips/propertys window]
Of course, this all relies on being able to select a file. Personally, I think single click select, double-click open is the only way to go there, although there is an argument, in the file-manager only, to let the middle-click button open items (even folders) in their application / a new window. In the file-viewer (konqueror) it would make more sense to have it open items in a new tab of course.
One other thing I saw that looked good, and taken from the ideas for the NeXT file-manager via Thunar (http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/ui:suggestion-20050320) is a series of bread-crumbs to work your way back. However instead of buttons have what appears to be a text-edit (though really a HTML pane) with each folder a hyperlink and a > icon between each item. For people who like to type in paths retain the clear button by the text-edit: the use-case then is a user hits the clear button, the bread-crumbs disappear, they type in a path, hit enter, and the path is changed to the bread-crumb hyperlinks as the location appears.
With regard to copy and paste, I think big copy and paste buttons on the toolbar should do the job.
I am a power user who happens to _like_ the integration of a web browser and file manager. The one thing I cannot stand about Windows/GNOME is that you can type a URL into the file manager, which at least on Windows is supposed to be one with the browser, and the application acts totally different than if you had started it in web browser mode.
I was also thoroughly pissed when I installed the new version of KDE and found that Konqueror was configured to used that obnoxious listbox-like Ark part for viewing archives, instead of a standard/modern icon view. I want to have a consistent interface when moving files around, whether inside or outside an archive.
The thing I like about Konqueror is the KParts. I like, for instance, that I can view a PDF file in the *same window* as a regular web page. That solves some of the window management issues discussed, for less windows to manage means less inefficiency & frustration, no?
I think Matthias is missing the trees for the forest. He sees the big picture of Konqueror being unusuable, but he forgets the simple ways in which it could be made more usable. On the topic of displaying sizes and permissions for pseudo-filesystems, so what? This could be solved with a simple patch that causes that information not to be displayed unless the ioslave provides it. This is how it should have worked to begin with. Or how about a sidepane that one can say is interactive and still maintain a straight face? And yet we are talking of forking Konqueror into two separate applications for such trivial causes? It seems the real problem is that Konqueror has not yet become a mature file manager, not that it is one with the web browser.
I understand that the new users see browsing and file management as two separate applications. This has not been solved with view profiles, however, simply because the current view profile implementation is highly defective. For instance, click on Settings->Load View Profile->Simple Browser. How much "simpler" is the simple browser? Not at all. Nothing happened, did it? The simpler XMLGUI file that is supposed to load, doesn't. How was this overlooked in the last two KDE releases? I am not trying to beat up on Konqueror, but we need to at least have features working before we can draw conclusions about their usability - no need to attack a straw man. The swiss army knife analogy was apt for this precise reason. If profiles for one worked the way they were supposed to, then it would be more like a single-blade knife that suddenly morphed into a screwdriver as needed.
>I was also thoroughly pissed when I installed the new version of KDE and found that Konqueror was configured to used that obnoxious listbox-like Ark part for viewing archives, instead of a standard/modern icon view. I want to have a consistent interface when moving files around, whether inside or outside an archive.<
Couldn't agree with you more!
Another pet peeve is when Konqueror opens up images or text files in EXTERNAL viewers. Totally lame and not integrated. It can't be rocket science to open text and images directly in the browser.
> Another pet peeve is when Konqueror opens up images or text files in EXTERNAL viewers. Totally lame and not integrated. It can't be rocket science to open text and images directly in the browser. <
Yes, I also alluded to this in my first post. I think the best way to handle this is to have a _global_ option of whether to open files in an embedded viewer or an external application, not for each individual mimetype.
What we need is real work on Konqueror as opposed to just KHTML. There are five-year-old Konqueror reports on bugzilla that still have not been addressed. For instance, http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3212 . I posted a patch that fixed this one, but it was completely ignored as are most.
There is a global setting for text type files for this, I don't have a recent KDE available at the moment. If you open open the properties for a text type file, and open the edit mimetype dialog. Under embedding tab in the left click action, you can set it to follow a acction for generic text files. I think this is set as default for most text filetypes, making it more or less default and you can at least set it "globally" for those. Not exactly what you want tho.
Personally I don't think a global setting for this are a good solution, as it a one-size-fits-all approach which does not really fit with the differences in workpattern concerning various filetypes. Having an easier way to rapidly set this would be a better solution. A simple list of all the different mimetypes where you could choose to embed or not embed, making it possible to customize this feature in a minute or two. Since you can never get defaults to satisfy most power users, it's better to make it easier for them. But not excluding having good default, and perhaps the defaults for embedding need a review.
What really bugs me with embedded previews are the lack of automatic zooming of pictures, the default for preview of a picture like a jpeg are 1:1 scaled. Rather useless when clicking on large pictures. The default should be fit to window, making the whole picture visible. I guess you can configure it, but it's about sane dafaults as I think most users will expect this.
Perhaps you should first ask whether there was a way to display this files embedded or not, no ???
1.) ALT+F2 and "filetypes"
2.) See the attached picture for details
Anyways, everyone and their mother seem to want to pick on Konqueror... I guess it is the in thing to do these days...


text:
VATICAN CITY, 30 SEP 2011 (VIS REPORTS) - Made public today was a Letter, written in Latin and dated from Castelgandolfo on 21 September, in which Benedict XVI appoints Cardinal Walter Kasper, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as his special envoy to celebrations marking the 950th anniversary of the dedication of Speyer Cathedral in Germany, due to take place on 2 October. (IMAGE SOURCE: RADIO VATICANA)
In his Letter the Pope dwells on the significance the cathedral, which was built between 1030 and 1061, has had in German history, also underlining its important role in confirming the faith of the German faithful and their union with Peter's Successor. The Holy Father likewise greets Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann ofSpeyer and express the hope that the forthcoming commemoration will be a time of grace. He concludes by inviting participants in the forthcoming celebration to practise the great Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, like the Virgin Mary to whom the cathedral is dedicated.
VATICAN CITY, 30 SEP 2011 (VIS) - Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone S.D.B. yesterday presided at Mass at the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Vatican Gardens for the feast of the patron of Vatican Radio. The Mass was concelebrated by, among others, Fr. Federico Lombardi S.J. and Fr. Andrzej Koprowski S.J., respectively director general and director of programmes of Vatican Radio which this year celebrates eighty years of activity.
In his homily Cardinal Bertone gave a brief overview of the history of Vatican Radio, and expressed the hope that it may continue to be "a typically ecclesiastical medium of communication; that is, attached to the Church in the same way that the vine shoot is attached to the vine which nourishes it".
Following Mass, Cardinal Bertone conferred pontifical medals on six employees of the radio "for their faithful service to the Pope and the Church", while Fr. Lombardi gave Cardinal Bertone the first copy of a two-volume work, "Eighty Years of the Radio of the Pope", which is due to be presented on 4 October.
The introduction to the work was written by Fr. Lombardi himself. "The aim of this book", he writes, "is to help people remember and understand how Vatican Radio (both as an institution and as a community of people) has accompanied the last seven pontificates with the awareness that it has a mission to accomplish, a message to spread and a duty continually to seek and find new instruments to broadcast it". Vatican Radio constantly seeks to combine "commitment to evangelisation, inculturation of the message for the various peoples of the world, and the technical know-how to make that message reach 'unto the ends of the earth'".
VATICAN CITY, 30 SEP 2011 (VIS) - On 27 September Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, secretary for Relations with States, addressed the sixty-sixth General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, focusing his remarks on the principal challenges facing the international community: humanitarian emergencies, lack of religious freedom and the economic crisis.
On the first of these subjects, Archbishop Mamberti recalled how "in certain parts of the world, such as the Horn of Africa, we find ourselves facing grave and dramatic humanitarian crises which cause millions of people, mostly women and children, to flee there homes, and many have fallen victim to drought, hunger and malnutrition. The Holy See wishes to renew its appeal to the international community, an appeal repeatedly voiced by Benedict XVI, to increase and support humanitarian policies in those areas".
Christians are the most persecuted religious group
The secretary for Relations with States then went on to consider the question of respect for religious freedom, which he described as "the fundamental way to build peace, to ensure recognition of human dignity and to protect the rights of man".
"Unfortunately, many situations exist in which the right to religious freedom is denied to followers of various religions. At the same time we are seeing an increase in religiously motivated intolerance, and we note that Christians are currently the religious group suffering the greatest number of persecutions on account of their faith. Lack of respect for religious freedom is a threat to security and peace", the archbishop said.
The solution to the problem lies "in a shared commitment to recognise and promote the religious freedom of each individual and each community". This requires "sincere inter-religious dialogue, promoted and practised by representatives of the various religious and supported by governments and international institutions".
Archbishop Mamberti then turned his attention to the global economic crisis. "We know that a fundamental part of the current plight is a lack of ethics in economic structures", he said. "The economy cannot function only through market self-regulation, and even less so through agreements limited to balancing the interests of the most powerful groups. It needs an ethical raison d'etre to ensure that it works for mankind. The idea of producing goods and services ... without seeking to do good - in other words, without ethics - has shown itself to be an illusion, either ingenuous or cynical, but always with fatal results. All economic decisions have moral consequences. The economy needs ethics ... focused on the person and capable of offering prospects to the new generations".
"The Holy See has repeatedly highlighted the need for fresh and profound reflection on the significance and objectives of economic activity, and for a clear-sighted revision of global financial and commercial structures in order to correct their dysfunctions and distortions. This revision of international economic rules must take place within the framework of a global model for development".
Such a model has to take account of the notion of "family of nations" so as to pay greater attention to the needs of poorer peoples. "By its nature a family is a community founded on interdependence and mutual trust. ... Its full development is based not on the supremacy of the strongest, but on care for the weakest, ... and its responsibility extends to future generations". Thus, Archbishop Mamberti concluded, "development strategies must be created which focus on people, favouring solidarity and responsibility towards everyone, including future generations".
On 26 September, the day prior to addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Archbishop Mamberti received a doctorate "honoris causa" from St. John's University in New York.
VATICAN CITY, 30 SEP 2011 (VIS) - Pope Benedict's general prayer intention for October is: "That the terminally ill may be supported by their faith in God and the love of their brothers and sisters".
His mission intention is: "That the celebration of World Mission Day may foster in the People of God a passion for evangelisation with the willingness to support the missions with prayer and economic aid for the poorest Churches".
VATICAN CITY, 30 SEP 2011 (VIS) - The Holy Father today received in separate audiences ten prelates from the Indonesian Episcopal Conference, on their "ad limina" visit:
- Archishop Vincentius Sensi of Ende.
- Bishop Silvester San of Depansar.
- Bishop Franciscus Kopong Kung of Larantuka.
- Bishop Gerulfus Kherubim Pareira S.V.D. of Maumere.
- Bishop Hubertus Leteng of Ruteng.
- Archbishop Ignatus Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo of Jakarta, Military Ordinary.
- Bishop Cosmas Michael Angkur O.F.M. of Bogor.
- Archishop Peter Turang of Kupang.
- Bishop Dominikus Saku of Atambua.
- Bishop Edmund Woga C.SS.R. of Weetebula.


text:
- "I yearn to run experiments with...fresh venom,...have ordered a collection of small, terribly cute animals on which to test it!.'"
- —Apothecary Lydon
Apothecary Lydon is a level 35 quest giver located in Tarren Mill in the contested territory of Hillsbrad Foothills. He is a member of the Royal Apothecary Society. Though strongly dedicated to the Dark Lady and the advancement of the Forsaken, he suffers from severe depression. The only thing that cheers him is the suffering of the living. He has a frog named Umpi whom he refers to as his "assistant" but treats with a lethal callusness. He poisons the dog Stanley as a test and for fun. He is likely working closely with Apothecary Jorell at the Go'Shek Farm in the Arathi Highlands.
He starts the following quests:
- [18] Journey to Tarren Mill
- [23] Blood of Innocents
- [22] Elixir of Suffering
- [24] Elixir of Pain
- [24] Elixir of Pain (2)
- [28] Elixir of Agony
- [28] Elixir of Agony (2)
- [30] Elixir of Agony (3)
- [30] Elixir of Agony (4)
- [30] Elixir of Agony (5)
- [45] Undamaged Venom Sac
- [55] Venom to the Undercity
See alsoEdit
See List of Hillsbrad Foothills NPCs.
Memorable QuotesEdit
- "Oh, <name>. . .the flowers are blooming in Hillsbrad and the air is so fresh and brisk. I can't help but to wallow in the misery of it all. I look out my grimy window and long for the day when our New Plague brings this world the death it deserves."
- "I was growing so terribly bored here. Not a single entertaining thing to do besides poison and disease Umpi and reanimate her. . .over and over and over again."
- "Sometimes I get so bored out here in Tarren Mill I like to open up the formaldehyde jar and let the lovely aroma waft through the air. Makes Umpi a little nervous though. So were you able to get a keg from the Dwarves? I swear if I have to stare at this deadly elixir without using it on someone for another day I am going to scream."
CataclysmEditThis section concerns content exclusive to Cataclysm.
In Cataclysm he is promoted to Master Apothecary Lydon and present at the Sludge Fields in Cataclysm, where he is rescued by players. He starts the following quests:
- [21] Freedom for Lydon
- [21] Protocol
- [21] Burnside Must Fall
- [21] A Blight Upon the Land
- [22] Trouble at Southshore


text:
This may surprise some of you: Entourage, that show about rich men and their cell phone conversations, is still on the air. It's the final season, and so the producers are really going all out: there's a pro athlete cameo (or five or ten) in just about every episode. Last night's show, "Second to Last," included Mark "Cuuuuubes" Cuban, Mark Texeira, Amar'e Stoudamire, Michael Strahan, and Alex Rodriguez in just over 20 minutes of air time. Here's a memorable clip.
I don't want to spoil anything for you—and if you're a truly committed fan and you haven't seen last night's episode yet, you may want to skip it—but I will say that all of the pros turned in extremely convincing performances of rich athletes talking about money on cell phones. Kudos to A-Rod, especially, for that whole walking-while-talking bit. It's a gift.
Thank you for your continued support of Deadspin. Happy Labor Day!
Before you call it a night, please join Dickey in Deadspin's very own Pick 'Em league. There will be prizes for those who pick 'em best.


text:
My name is Bean, and I've been writing fic for a long time, now. Harry Potter has always been my first and strongest love, and I love everything about this universe and its characters. I am here for life- no getting rid of this cat.
Expect a lot of variance here! I write a lot of things, from poetry to smut, angst to fluffy romance, and lots of different pairings! Been away from the site for a while and am going to attempt to get back into the groove of it, so we'll see how it goes!
Thanks for being here :)


text:
Hey everyone♡♡♡♡ Here's today's outfit ^.^ I got this lovely floral print dress from Pull&Bear on sale, my mom showed it to me and I thought it was very pretty :'D I wore it with my cat ears headband, ripped fishnet tights, a bug ring & my Lita España boots.
♡ As always, thank you for all of your sweet comments!! ^-^


text:
Second CE Space Workshop 2006
The second Concurrent Engineering (CE) for Space Applications workshop took place at ESTEC on the 19-20 October 2006. The workshop was organised following the success of the 2004 workshop and the continuing growth and importance of CE in space engineering.
The workshop was well attended by over 100 representatives of industry, universities and agencies from around Europe, as well as attendees from as far afield as Australia and America.
The opening address was performed by the ESTEC Director Michel Courtois who had also opened the 2004 workshop. His address recognised the growing use of CE throughout the space industry and asked the question as to whether CE can be applied to later phases of the life-cycle of space projects.
CEW 2006 included 5 sessions dedicated to the following topics:
- Concurrent design centres
- Application of CE in the space system life cycle
- Towards integration of distributed centres
- Performance and Standards
- Methods and Tools
The five topics were interspersed by four keynote speeches; the first given by M. Pallot (ESoCE-NET-F) on 'Concurrent Innovation' and the second given by I. Laso (EC-B) titled 'Towards collaborative systems empowering and motivating people to work together', on day one of the workshop. The speeches by R. Smyth (Airbus-F) and E. Fricke (BMW-D) entitled respectively 'Standards and their implementation for methods and tools in collaborative systems development and the integration processes' and 'A view on concurrent systems engineering from an automotive perspective', were given on day two.
With 16 presentations on the first day and 15 on the second there was a degree of pressure to not overrun and most presenters kept within their allotted time thereby allowing time for questions.
The first day ended with a social event during which Massimo Bandecchi (organiser of the workshop) humorously presented the prize for the best paper from the 2004 workshop to C.M. Paccagnini (AAS-I).
The evening was a perfect opportunity to discuss the wide scope of presentations of the day ranging from details of the latest concurrent design facilities and tools to the fascinating use of CE by the Victorian Space Science Education Centre in Melbourne (Australia) to design curricula for secondary and high schools. The following comments were used to describe the workshop and the ideas and desires around CE.
"This unique ESA Concurrent Engineering workshop facilitates discussions between the most advanced teams in the world, in a collaborative and forward thinking way." Kjell A. Bengtsson - Senior Vice President - Jotne EPM Technology
"Collaborative engineering is the way we have to work to secure the future of our technical product. We need to be supported by the architects who manage and direct the concurrent engineering from the users to the customers." Richard Smyth - Vice President Policy - Airbus
Day two started early with a presentation by M. Bandecchi (ESA/ESTEC), on the CDF vision of the way forward. This included the new concepts of iCDF (a CDF accessible from a remote location via the Internet) and a new concept of Engineering Design Model Data Exchange based on open standards, to be used by the whole space community.
The day ended with an open discussion on the workshop, followed by a guided visit to the CDF.
The initial feedback on the workshop was that it was very valuable and the idea to have such a workshop every two years to allow the free exchange of information and current practices was to be applauded.
The following quotes, collected at the end of the workshop show how the event was received:
"I think the CDF is a very interesting approach, also for the automotive industry for conceptual work." Ernst Fricke - Head of System Engineering - BMW
"The fact that we had people coming from different industrial areas other than space added a lot to the workshop." Franco Ongaro - ESA/HQ
"This conference supports the most focused discussion of concurrent engineering for aerospace that I know of." Paul DeFlorio - Project Design Centre Manager - JPL
"This was a very good event and I very much appreciate the open standard and the open attitude the CDF has taken to industry and international partners." Hans Stower - President INCOSE


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No. 12 Wisconsin survive N Iowa scare, win 26-21
O'Brien passes for 2 scores in Wisconsin debut
Montee Ball rushed for 120 yards and a touchdown, and No. 12 Wisconsin needed a big defensive play to survive a fourth-quarter scare from Northern Iowa in a 26-21 victory Saturday.
Wisconsin's defense didn't allow Northern Iowa on its side of the 50-yard line until the 4:27 mark in the third quarter - but then the Badgers nearly melted down.
Leading 26-7 in the fourth quarter, Wisconsin allowed Northern Iowa quarterback Sawyer Kollmorgen to throw a pair of long touchdowns to David Johnson, cutting the lead to five. With the Panthers facing fourth-and-1 at the Wisconsin 41-yard line, defensive lineman Ethan Hemer tipped the ball at the line of scrimmage to stop the drive.
Kollmorgen threw for 265 yards and three touchdowns for the Panthers, regarded as one of the top FCS teams in the country.
New Badgers starting quarterback Danny O'Brien completed 19 of 23 passes for 219 yards and a pair of touchdowns to Jared Abbrederis.
O'Brien is a transfer who was eligible to play for the Badgers right away because he already had graduated from Maryland, the same rule Russell Wilson took advantage of to play for the Badgers last year.
Coaches and teammates went out of their way this week to establish realistic expectations for O'Brien and shield him against direct comparisons to Wilson - a remarkable playmaker who led the Badgers to a Big Ten title and Rose Bowl appearance last season, and now has won a starting job with the NFL's Seattle Seahawks as a rookie.
For Ball, it was a chance to brush off his recent off-the-field trouble. Ball was beaten up in an attack near campus a month ago, sustaining a concussion and missing part of camp.
It also was the debut for Badgers offensive coordinator Matt Canada, who replaced new Pittsburgh head coach Paul Chryst.
Canada made his intentions clear right away, attempting to wear down Northern Iowa with a heavy dose of Ball. But the Panthers were up to the task early on, holding Ball to two yards or fewer on six of his first 12 carries.
The Badgers handed the ball to Ball eight times in a 14-play opening drive for a 32-yard field goal by Kyle French.
O'Brien nearly got off to a rough start, as standout Panthers cornerback Varmah Sonie jumped a route and came close to picking O'Brien's second passing attempt.
The Panthers' defense then made a stand deep in its own territory, stuffing Ball for a one-yard loss on a second-and-2 at the 14. After an incomplete pass that tight end Brian Wozniak appeared to drop, the Badgers had to settle for the field goal.
Wisconsin continued to put together long strings of possession, but couldn't turn their possessions into points. They had to settle for another field goal midway through the second quarter, a 35-yarder by French for a 6-0 lead.
The Badgers finally broke through late in the second quarter. Facing a third-and-22 situation after a sack and a negative run by Ball, O'Brien hit tight end Jacob Pedersen for a first down. Ball ran for 14 yards through a big hole up the middle three plays later, and O'Brien found Abbrederis wide open in the end zone for a 10-yard touchdown and a 13-0 lead with just under a minute left before halftime.
Wisconsin seemingly took control of the game on its first drive of the second half, as O'Brien drove the Badgers for a 1-yard touchdown run by Ball. French's extra point was blocked, and the Badgers led 19-0 with 10:22 left in the third quarter.
The Panthers' offense finally got past the 50-yard line late in the third quarter - and kept going from there. Kollmorgen threw a 21-yard pass to Brett LeMaster on fourth-and-4, then threw a 2-yard touchdown to Chad Owens on third-and-goal to cut the Badgers' lead to 19-7.
But O'Brien answered almost right away, throwing a rainbow to Abbrederis for a 53-yard touchdown and a 26-7 lead with 12:31 remaining.
The Panthers weren't finished, as Kollmorgen threw to Johnson for a 55-yard catch-and-run for a touchdown to cut the lead to 26-14. Then they scored again when Kollmorgen found Johnson wide open down the right sideline for a 31-yard touchdown, cutting the lead to 26-21 with 7:24 left.
Northern Iowa forced a punt, and Wisconsin would need the big stop from Hemer to preserve the win.


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In the Volcanic Eifel, violent explosions and fire from the depths have blasted holes in the earth given birth to towering mountains. It was here that Germany's youngest volcano, the Ulmen Maar or crater lake, was formed 10,900 years ago.
Sprawling heights, thick forests, clear streams, fragrant meadows and charming villages: the Volcanic Eifel is a picture-perfect holiday destination that is peaceful beyond compare. Beneath the ground, however, it's anything but peaceful: there the violent forces that once gave birth to this enchanting, and at times harsh, landscape are still active.
It was fire and water that formed the Volcanic Eifel and it is fire and water that continues to form it today. With approximately 350 volcanoes of various sizes, crater lakes, lava flows and countless mineral and carbonated springs, the Volcanic Eifel's ongoing legacy is truly striking. And that's not all that the Volcanic Eifel's historic depths have to offer: sandstones, tropical reefs and mighty lake deposits bear witness to periods of peace and turmoil spanning the last 400 million years.
Few regions on Earth give such a distinctive and fascinating insight into their origins and development. This makes the Volcanic Eifel an exquisite piece of natural heritage, which has been awarded European Geopark status and is part of the UNESCO Global Geopark Network. In 2010 it was also awarded nature park status.
Geo-museums make scientific phenomena accessible to all and carefully selected cycle and hiking tours lead visitors on a journey through the treasures of this fascinating landscape. Visitors can also find inspiration on exciting certified guided tours which invite them to enjoy the tastes and thrills, the walking and hiking, the cycling and mountain biking and the exploration and discovery of this multifaceted land of crater lakes and volcanoes.
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Why ME, God?
I almost died over the weekend. On Wednesday the 4th, I went to the hospital to have yet another Endoscopy done to fix yet ANOTHER stricture. Well, my surgeon wasn't available and with hubbys work schedule like it is (he has to watch Caleb all day), I had to have it done by another surgeon.
Well, she tore me.
Which turned into a leak. Then renal failure, another surgery to fix the leak, three days in the ICU and then another four days in the bariatric unit. I finally got home Wednesday night and I am wiped.
No scrapping for me this month. It's all I can do to walk at this point. I am in SO much pain. Thank God for Lortab! (even though it just barely numbs the pain sometimes)
Please keep me in your prayers.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Sometimes I just have to wonder....
Why ME, God?
Posted by Jenny B in Indy at 11:17 AM 0 comments


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EDITED 9/23/11 TO ADD: PUBSLUSH contacted me after they saw this post, and we had a cordial email exchange. They've made a number of changes to answer some of the issues identified above. See my update.PUBSLUSH Press.
EDITED JULY 2013 TO ADD: Pubslush's business model has been re-worked--it is now a crowdfunding site, a la Kickstarter, and has de-emphasized the publishing program, although publishing is still part of its mission. It has refused to share its publishing contract with me.
From PUBSLUSH's FAQ page:
What is PUBSLUSH Press? PS Press (as we prefer to call ourselves) is a full service publishing platform that connects writers directly with their readers using social media. We operate like a traditional publishing house, except we let the reading public decide what gets published. Best of all, we give you the power to change lives. For every book purchased, we will donate a book to a child in need.What this means, basically, is that PS functions rather like Kickstarter, Unbound, and other crowdsourced funding websites--except that instead of pledging cash, donors promise to buy books once they're published. Writers submit 10 pages plus a summary of their manuscripts to the PS website, where the submission is displayed for 120 days. Potential supporters can read the material and, if they like it, pledge their support--from $25 to receive physical and digital copies of the book, to $500 to receive the books plus a variety of perks such as a dedication and a copy of the original manuscript (you must submit your credit card information in order to make a pledge, but according to PS's FAQ, your card is only charged if the book is selected for publication). Once a book receives 2,000 supporters (though see below), PS will publish it, and pay $5,000 to the author (again, see below). There are no entry fees or other fees to participate in the site.
Leaving aside any reservations about the effectiveness of crowdsourcing as a way of locating quality material, and any doubts as to whether it's possible to convince 2,000 people to contribute $25 based on 10 pages of manuscript, and the silly "the traditional system is broken so we need a new process" stuff in the About Us section of PS's website, and concerns about PS's apparent use of spam-style emails to publicize its service and recruit aspiring authors...leaving aside all those things, PS seems like an interesting idea. Rather than focusing on funding the creative process--which then may or may not make it in the marketplace--PS cuts to the chase: book sales. Essentially, supporters are pre-ordering books, which means that any author who attains the publishing threshold is guaranteed at least 2,000 sales. Not too shabby, in an overstuffed book market, where sales for small press-published books often struggle to rise beyond low three figures. Plus, there's that $5,000 payment.
But--and you knew there would be a but, didn't you?--there are some unanswered questions, as well as a number of concerns.
- Who is PUBSLUSH Press? What experience does PS's staff have with publishing? There's no information whatever at the website. You thus have no assurance that your book will be competently edited, published, distributed, or marketed. Pre-sales or no, that's still a very important question. (A bit of digging yields this interview, which identifies PS's founders as Jesse Potash and Hellen Barbara, who say they have "extensive experience from a wide array of industries"--but not which ones.)
- If you submit to PS, you're done submitting, at least for a while. PS's Publication Agreement--to whose terms you agree simply by uploading your submission--requires that for the 120 days you'll be on the PS site, you cannot submit to any other publisher or service similar to PS. If you submit while the site is still in beta, the 120 days extends from the website's official launch, not from your actual submission date. Do you really want to put your book on hold?
- While your submission is available on the PS website, PS promises that it will also (theoretically at least, since manuscript display websites haven't proven to be major magnet for editors) be available to publishing house editors. If a contract offer results, PS will "act as your agent to facilitate the contract." I could find nothing on the PS website, or in its Terms of Service, to indicate what that entails, or what sort of commission, if any, might be due. This needs some major clarification.
- According to PS's FAQ, 2,000 supporters are need for publication. According to the Publication Agreement, the number is 2,500. PS is in beta, and I'm thinking this discrepancy is a startup glitch--but since submitting to PS constitutes automatic acceptance of all the terms of the Publication Agreement, this is something that really needs to be resolved.
- Another discrepancy: the royalties mentioned in PS's FAQ (35% for ebooks, 20% for direct sales, and 10% for trade sales) don't match the royalties in the Publication Agreement (40% for ebook sales, 25% for audio sales, 10% for trade sales, and 7% for direct and book club sales). Although royalties may be a moot point; see below.
- And another discrepancy: Authors chosen for publication receive $5,000, a payment that PS's FAQ describes as an advance. Per Paragraph 5 of the Publication Agreement, however, the $5,000 is not an advance at all, but a publication bonus that "shall not be used as a credit against the royalties payable to Author pursuant to Paragraph 7 of this Agreement."
What does that mean? Well, according to Paragraph 7, "Author shall not be entitled to royalties on the initial printing of the Work, and shall receive only the initial publication bonus set forth in Paragraph 5 with respect to income from the initial printing." Royalties become due only on subsequent printings.
This sounds horrible, but in some circumstances--theoretically, at least--could work out in the author's favor. Per the Publication Agreement, the initial printing is 2,500-3,000 copies (remember, most of those copies have been pre-sold). If the print run is 2,500 copies and your book retails for $12.99, your royalties (10% of list price) would have been $3,248, so you'd actually be $1,752 to the good.
It's a bit hard to see how this makes sense, from the publisher's standpoint. Of course, it's possible that when royalties do become due on subsequent printings, they will be withheld till the unearned balance of the bonus is recouped--there's nothing in the Publication Agreement to suggest this, but there's nothing to preclude it, either. Also, any author advantage disappears as cover prices rise--for instance, for a print run of 3,000 and a cover price of $18.99, royalties due would be $5,697, saving the publisher over $600. Keeping cover prices high, therefore, would seem to be to PS's benefit--if not to readers'.
- Again per Paragraph 7, authors receive royalties on electronic and audio versions of the book. Will those royalties be subject to the same first-printing embargo? The contract doesn't say. This is another issue that really needs to be clarified.
- Still in Paragraph 7: "Royalty rates are subject to modification by Publisher for administrative and financial reasons, at Publisher's sole discretion, and royalty rates shall not be confirmed with respect to a particular Work until such date as Author is notified that its Work has been selected for publication." In other words, authors must agree on submission to a Publication Agreement that offers them no assurance as to what their royalties will actually be.
- These are far from the only issues with PS's Publication Agreement. It's a life-of-copyright agreement with a completely inadequate reversion clause ("out of print" isn't even rudimentarily defined; moreover, authors can't demand reversion until the book has been out of print for at least two years); there are sweeping claims on a wide range of subrights despite the lack of any evidence that PUBSLUSH is capable of exploiting them; there's an onerous competitive works clause; and there's an option clause that amounts to a perpetual option on sequels and related works. Moreover, because submitting to PS constitutes full agreement to all these terms, the author forfeits any possibility of negotiation.
- Did I mention that you bind yourself to all the terms of the Publication Agreement simply by submitting? Yes, I did, several times--but it's a point that bears repeating, especially since writers so often gloss over the fine print. In any situation where submission constitutes automatic agreement, you owe it to yourself to carefully consider what you are agreeing to, and whether you are willing to be bound by those terms if you're picked for publication.
- As I said above, I think PUBSLUSH is an interesting idea, and--except for the founders' possible lack of publishing experience--all the issues I've identified can be fixed pretty easily. However, PUBSLUSH has no track record at the moment. It's an unknown quantity. (As of this writing, only 2 of the 10 properties on PS's website have garnered any pledges, for a grand total of 7 supporters.) Given what it's asking authors to commit to, that constitutes a major risk. Do you want to be a guinea pig?
EDITED 9/23/11 TO ADD: PUBSLUSH contacted me after they saw this post, and we had a cordial email exchange. They've made a number of changes to answer some of the issues identified above. See my update.
EDITED JULY 2013 TO ADD: Pubslush's business model has been re-worked--it is now a crowdfunding site, a la Kickstarter, and has de-emphasized the publishing program, although publishing is still part of its mission. See the note at the bottom of my update for more.


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Exploring Rational Drug Design
Medicinal chemists strive to optimize molecules that fit snugly into their proposed targets. But in the quest for potency, we often overlook the local physics that govern drugs' binding to these receptors. What if we could rationally predict which drugs bind well to their targets?
A new review, currently out on J. Med. Chem. ASAP, lays out all the computational backing behind this venture. Three computational chemists (David Huggins, Woody Sherman, and Bruce Tidor) break down five binding events from the point-of-view of the drug target: Shape Complementarity, Electrostatics, Protein Flexibility, Explicit Water Displacement, and Allosteric Modulation….whew!
Note: Before we dive into this article, let's clarify a few terms computational drug-hunters use that bench chemists think of differently: 'decoy' – a test receptor used to perform virtual screens; 'ligand' – the drug docking into the protein; 'affinity / selectivity' – a balance of characteristics, or how tightly something binds vs. which proteins it binds to; 'allosteric' – binding of a drug molecule to a different site on an enzyme than the normal active site. Regular readers and fans of compu-centric chem blogs such as The Curious Wavefunction and Practical Fragments will feel right at home!
We'll start at the top. Shape complementarity modeling uses small differences in a binding pocket, such as a methylene spacer in a residue (say, from a Val to Ile swap) to dial-in tighter binding between a target and its decoy. The authors point out that selectivity can often be enhanced by considering a drug that's literally too big to fit into a related enzymatic cavity. They provide several other examples with a ROCK-1 or MAP kinase flavor, and consider software packages designed to dock drugs into the "biologically active" conformation of the protein.
Electrostatic considerations use polar surface maps, the "reds" and "blues" of a receptor's electronic distribution, to show how
molecular contacts can help binding to overcome the desolvation penalty (the energy cost involved in moving water out and the drug molecule in). An extension of this basic tactic, charge optimization screening, can be used to test whole panels of drugs against dummy receptors to determine how mutations might influence drug binding.
Because target proteins move and shift constantly, protein flexibility, the ability of the protein to adapt to a binding event, is another factor worth considering. The authors point out that many kinases possess a "DFG loop" region that can shift and move to reveal a deeper binding cavity in the kinase, which can help when designing binders (for a collection of several receptors with notoriously shifty binding pockets – sialidase, MMPs, cholinesterase – see p. 534 of Teague's NRDD review).
But these shifting proteins also swim in a sea of water and other cytoplasmic goodies. This means that drug designers, whether they like it or not, must account for explicit water molecules. The authors even suggest a sort of "on-off" switch for including the bound water molecules, but contend that more efforts should be directed to accurate modeling of water in these protein settings.
Finally, the authors weigh the effects of allosteric binding, the potential for a modeled molecule to be highly selective for a site apart from where the protein binds its native ligand. The authors consider the case of a PTP1B ligand that binds 20Å away from the normal active site, at the previously mentioned "DFG loop." Since this binding hadn't been seen for related phosphatases, it could then be used to control selectivity for PTP1B.
In each section, the authors provide examples of modeling studies that led to the design of a molecule. Two target classes recur often throughout the review: HIV protease inhibitors (saquinavir, lopinavir, darunavir) and COX-2 inhibitors (celecoxib), which have all been extensively modeled.
Two higher-level modeling problems are also introduced: the substrate-envelope hypothesis, which deals with rapidly mutating targets, and tailoring molecules to take rides in and out of the cell using influx and efflux pumps in the membrane. Since different cell types overexpress certain receptors, we can use this feature to our advantage. This strategy has been especially successful in the development of several cancer and CNS drugs.
Overall, the review feels quite thorough, though I suspect regular Haystack readers may experience the same learning curve I did when adapting to the field-specific language that permeates each section. Since pictures are worth a thousand words, I found that glancing through the docking graphics that accompany each section helped me gain a crucial foothold into the text.


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At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that 'news' is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different—in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Showing posts from May 25, 2008


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Maybe The Situation has the brains to go along with the brawn.
The six-packed "Jersey Shore" cast member signed a contract for the third season of MTV's hit reality show, perhaps signaling the end to a contract impasse that threatened to stall the show's production, according to E!
The Hollywood Reporter indicated that new deals for the remaining stars were imminent. Each cast member received $5,000 per episode during the first season and $10,000 for the second. They were asking for $30,000 per episode for the third season.
MTV would not confirm any rumors. "We don't comment on any contractual conversations," the network said in a statement. "Season 2 premieres July 29 and production is on schedule."
Michael Petolino, the manager for The Situation, a.k.a. Mike Sorrentino, released a statement on the new deal.
"Mike is confident the rest of the cast will rally around him as they have done in the past. The Situation has always been respected and well-liked by the entire cast. He felt that he could break the stalemate by putting these rumors of a cast strike to rest by moving forward and leading the cast to another hit season."
One Less Contract "Situation" for "Jersey Shore"
Maybe The Situation has the brains to go along with the brawn.


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MY RIDE- John Carden- Segway
It's been nearly three years since John Carden bought his $4,500 Segway personal transporter, and he's still charmed with his ride.
"It sure beats sitting in traffic," he says. "You never suffer road rage when you're on a Segway. You can't be anything but optimistic."
Carden, who owns Carden Salon on the Downtown Mall, made news in 2003 when he chased down a thief on his Segway. Since then, he says, "The streets have been much calmer and safer."
Well, for the most part.
"I did ride it into the salon and crash through a plate glass window," he admits. "I was sort of hotshotting through the salon, and I was brought back down to earth as I caught the corner of a potted plant and the wheel went through the door."
But despite the mishap, Carden remains upbeat.
"I didn't fall off," he jokes. "That's the great thing about it."
John Carden
What drives you? Call 295-8700 ext. 239, then pull up in front of Hook headquarters at 100 Second St. NW, and tell us why you love your ride. Each week's featured driver will receive a free car wash courtesy of H&H Quality Car Care.